UX People, November 2010

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be talking at UX People in London on “Coping Strategies: UX in an Agile World” and myself and Ann will be hosting a workshop in the afternoon.

The Talk

Two years ago, I joined a software development consultancy (Lab49). We’re specialists at creating bespoke software for human based trading, algorithmic trading and risk management within wholesale or investment banking. Most of the projects there are run on agile principles – typically “Lean Agile” and Scrum, but lately we’ve been exploiting the benefits of Kanban and investigating Srumban. Previously, I worked in advertising.

To say I had a hill to climb is definitely true. I was the first UX employee in the company, and I had to figure out capital markets, consultancy and agile PDQ. Happily I’d already had some exposure to all three – but not all at once.

We’re now two years further down the line, and I’ve learned a lot. In my talk at UX People, I’ll be sharing with you some of the ideas and processes that we decided weren’t effective enough, the concepts we’re trying next and some attitudinal and practical ideas that you can take back to your own business and apply if you work in an agile environment.

For now, as a tiny sneak preview, here’s my presentation. Don’t expect to get the speech from the slides. I might follow this up in the coming weeks with short posts on some of the topics that explains my thoughts and learnings.

The Workshop

The afternoon workshop is going to be very exploratory in nature. All the headline agile methodologies (RUP, Scrum, XP) have been originated from a software production / development point of view with a tendency to assume that each individual is an expert generalist at everything needed to complete a task (UI design, coding, testing).

We have the rare treat of some space and time. Let’s think about what a UX originated agile process might look like. What would we borrow from the existing techniques? Do we like time boxing or pull? How do we construct a simple and effective team of specialists to complete a complex piece of software or a website?